Shirin Bahmanyar, Seeing How Cells Work as Never Before

(l-r) Yumei Wu, Xinran Liu, Pietro De Camilli, Derek Toomre, and Shirin Bahmanyar (Photo by Anthony DeCarlo)
August 2, 2018

Shirin Bahmanyar’s work on cells’ nuclear envelope pockets was one example cited when De Camilli, Toomre, and Xinran Liu, MD, PhD, director of the electron microscopy facility in the Center for Cellular & Molecular Imaging, secured National Science Foundation funding to bring FIB-SEM to Yale. Bahmanyar is investigating how the DNA housed in the nuclear envelope of every cell in a living organism is accurately replicated, with the copy then safely encased when cells divide. It is an intricate process through which the ER—a complex network of membranes that generate the nuclear envelope—changes shape, opens and closes, and even appears to change its biochemical composition as division occurs, all for the purpose of preserving and propagating an organism’s most fundamental feature, its genetic code.

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